Burke: Give Trump credit for skill in keeping us off-balance

By Tom Burke

Herald columnist

I was wrong about Donald Trump. Really, I was wrong.

For two-plus years I’ve written, or agreed with people, that Donald Trump, our president, is: incompetent; psychotically narcissistic; a liar; a grifter; a cheat; a liar; a thief; intellectually dead; unable to focus; too lazy to read; too dense to absorb information; incurious; a liar; emotionally crippled; a racist; a liar; misanthropic; a liar; a sell-out to Russia; a b.s. artist; a liar; lazy; self-centered; crude; careless; delusional; xenophobic; a liar; and the worst president ever. I gave him credit for nothing.

But I should have, given him credit.

Because he deserves credit, a lot of credit, for being the most open president ever; even more open than Harry Truman, who willingly offered everyone a good piece of his mind.

But Donald Trump does more. He tells us everything. What he’s thinking. What he’s feeling. What he knows. What he plans to do. Everything.

And that’s why I continue to agree (and write) that Donald J. Trump, our president, is incompetent; psychotically narcissistic; a liar; a grifter; a cheat; a liar; a thief; intellectually dead; unable to focus; too lazy to read; etc., etc., etc.

Because Trump clearly tells us every day, with every speech, on every tweet that he knows nothing of history, politics, tradition, societal norms, presidential norms, international relations, finance, trade, or moral rectitude (and that’s the short list).

Because Donald Trump is thinking (and sharing) the same dangerous thoughts about the free press every dictator ever thought, calling, for instance, for “retribution” against NBC for satirizing him on “Saturday Night Live” and labeling, again, The New York Times, “a true ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!” (For the history challenged, Joseph Stalin’s most famous media quote is, “THE RIGGED AND CORRUPT MEDIA IS THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!” and he slaughtered journalists and other “enemies of the people” by the millions.)

Because Trump knows as much about our Constitutional government as did Idi Amin, and demonstrated his ignorance by declaring a “National Emergency” to fund his stupid wall, right now, right after saying “I could do the wall over a longer period of time. I didn’t need to do this.”

Because Trump believes Russia’s dictator, Vladimir Putin, more than he believes the entire U.S. intelligence community, saying, when told by America’s intelligence experts North Korean had the ICBM capability to hit the U.S., that they were wrong, because Putin told him so. When these experts corrected him, he said, “I don’t care. I believe Putin.”

Because his brain is like a constantly running toilet, flushing unadulterated effluent through the Twitter pipes, like when he said “I built a lot of wall. I have a lot of money and I built a lot of wall,” when not one inch, not one millimeter, of his new wall has been constructed; or his tweet: “Billions of Dollars are being paid to the United States by China in the form of Trade Tariffs!” when not a tariff penny is paid by China, but every cent of it is paid by U.S. consumers buying Chinese goods.

Because his attacks on the Justice Department and the FBI are classic authoritarian tactics calculated to destroy our faith in these institutions as he quotes Rush Limbaugh, “Fox and Friends,” and then personally accuses his own deputy attorney general of an “illegal coup attempt;” following up with another screed, saying, “The Mueller investigation is totally conflicted, illegal and rigged!”

Because Trump’s apparent inability to discern fact from the fiction in his head (or what he hears on Fox News) is demonstrated by his fantasy tweet, “There are at least 25,772,342 illegal aliens, not the 11,000,000 that have been reported for years, in our Country. So ridiculous! DHS.” Except DHS officially said, last December, that there were 12 million undocumented aliens living in the U.S.

Or his specious speeches about duct-taped women being smuggled into the U.S. (there is no proof from DHS, ICE or local law enforcement) and his attacks on El Paso and the fiction that a wall drove down crime, which El Paso’s mayor, sheriff, and congressman say is a lie.

One of the biggest problems we face, as we face Donald Trump’s insanity, is how we’ve become inured to his behavior. When he says something outrageous, like Barack Obama, “told me he was so close to starting a big war with North Korea” (he wasn’t), we say, “Oh, that’s just Trump being Trump,” and move on to his next outrage.

So, gentle reader, my question is, is Trump’s tidal wave of outrage-inducing behavior part of a far-reaching Machiavellian plot to keep us distracted and confused; or simply the behavior of, as conservative columnist Ann Coulter labeled him, “An idiot?”

Borrowing a line from Fox News, “We report. You decide.”

Tom Burke’s email address is t.burke.column@gmail.com.